Typology and Functions of Metonymies in Spanish

This project aims to check existing classifications of metonymies empirically on the basis of a large Spanish text corpus consisting of literary, journalistic and spoken texts. The metonymic expressions contained in these texts will be collected and described in a relational database in order to define the most frequent metonymic relations precisely. Furthermore, the study aims to examine whether and to what extent metonymic types are used in specific contexts. There is a great need for such an investigation because the existing typologies are still not sophisticated enough to contribute to a motivated theory of metonymy. In addition, is has to be noticed that the majority of studies focus on metonymies in English but only a few concentrate on Romance languages. For rhetoricians and literary specialists metaphors and metonymies have always been among the most important figures of speech. Linguists have also become interested in these tropes, because they consider that metaphors and metonymies are not only rhetorical means but fundamental cognitive processes, which play an important role in the production and reception of language. Thus, the research of metaphors and metonymies will bring a deeper knowledge of the way people think and the relation between language and mind. Among the research done in this field most studies, however, mainly concentrate on metaphors. Moreover, most of the relatively few studies aimed at providing a motivated cognitive theory of metonymy are only based on a rather small number of well-known examples and don`t derive their results from a larger empirical basis. Consequently, most of the classifications of metonymic types seem to be incomplete.